I like seeing businesses succeed. That is why I enjoyed writing Friday's story on Covera Ventures, which is raising its second fund, worth $125 million. It has sold eight of its 21 portfolio companies backed with money from the company's first fund.

But Covera is something of an anomaly on the Dallas-Fort Worth venture capital scene. Since the technology and telecommunications bubbles burst a decade ago, VCs have been somewhat scarce on the local prairie — as have their investment dollars.

A few reasons why:

Venture capitalists on the East and West Coasts are increasingly staying closer to home. They're investing in and tending to deals in their neighborhoods, rather than going far a field to Texas for monthly board meetings and such. Which connects to the related problem of ...

Many Texas VCs have closed up shop or scaled back their operations, and few new investors have taken their place.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area suffers from the perception that it's all about telecommunications, an industry that chewed up and spit out a bunch of well-funded companies early in the previous decade.

It's become tougher for VCs to cash in their investments via sales, mergers or initial public offerings of the companies they invest in. The IPO window has been largely shut to all but a select group of companies, which has helped push down the prices that VCs get from selling businesses.